STANWOOD – For years, Kayak Point Golf Course south of Stanwood has been one of the top public golf courses in Western Washington.
And for years, a revolving door of general managers and head pros at the scenic hilltop course, not to mention a series of questionable corporate decisions, has diminished what otherwise should have been one of the area’s great golfing experiences.
Now a new management group, Access Golf Management LLC of Redmond, has taken over the operating lease at Snohomish County-owned Kayak Point. The lease, which was previously held by Arnold Palmer Golf Management LLC, expires in 2019, but “we hope to be here for 50 years,” Access Golf controller Jason Matzat said. “We love the golf course.”
Access Golf owns and operates three other public courses in the Puget Sound area – Willows Run Golf Course in Redmond, Druids Glen Golf Course outside of Kent and Capitol City Golf Club in Olympia. Those three courses have prospered under Access Golf’s management, Matzat said, and customers can expect the same at Kayak Point in the coming years.
That should be welcome news to those golfers who stayed faithful to Kayak Point during some rather tumultuous years. When longtime director of golf Elwin Fanning retired a few years ago, the Palmer group took over management at the course and unfortunately delivered little of the excellence that is synonymous with the company’s namesake.
In recent years, “there’s been a lot of ups and downs,” said Doug Holmes, president of the Kayak Point men’s club. “We’d get a director of golf or a head pro, and then all of a sudden he’d be gone and they’d bring somebody else in.”
In terms of course maintenance, “Palmer just quit putting any interest into it,” Holmes added. “They were doing absolutely nothing. By the time membership got word of the change (which officially occurred on May 17), we just kind of sighed with relief. We thought, ‘Maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.’”
Holmes remembers when Kayak Point had a men’s club of around 400 members. Today that figure is closer to 150, he said. Many members left in disgust several years ago when the course instituted a mandatory-cart policy for Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The policy was later rescinded, but the decision seemed to typify the distance between the customer base at Kayak Point and the management.
Matzat, meanwhile, recalls a visit to Kayak Point when he saw “customers actually putting gas in the carts they were renting from us. And there were other carts that weren’t even running because they had broken down.”
Back then, he added wryly, “there was a lot of weird stuff going on.”
Since taking over, Access Golf has installed a new director of golf, Brian Wilk, and a new head pro, Sam Jones. Otherwise, many of the people in the clubhouse and on the maintenance crews have been retained, and they have been part of an ambitious program to upgrade the course, pro shop, restaurant and other facilities.
“In this short amount of time, I can’t believe how much has changed,” said Clint Goold, Kayak Point’s director of maintenance. “Already it’s doing a 360 … . Right off the bat, (golfers) have been coming up to us and saying, ‘Wow, we can see the definition between your fairways and your rough, and we can see the definition on your tee boxes.’”
“A month into this,” Matzat said, Kayak Point “is not a comparable product to what it was. And by this time next year I’d be shocked if we weren’t making more money for the county, making more money for ourselves, and having a much happier clientele. I think we’re going to blow the socks off these people, I really do.”
Kayak Point has long drawn much of its play from the surrounding cities of Stanwood, Marysville and Everett, but has also attracted other players from Seattle and the Eastside as well as Skagit and Whatcom counties, and even British Columbia.
“We need play to come from everywhere, especially on the weekends,” Wilk said. “Seattle, for sure we need that business.”
Getting golfers to make a long commute “is a challenge,” he admitted, which is why Access Golf is putting particular emphasis on upgrading all its facilities. The restaurant, for example, is going through marked changes, as will the pro shop. The idea, Wilk explained, is to provide services for “people who drive from Seattle to come out here for a full day of playing golf, maybe taking a lesson and just hanging out. They’ll stay, they’ll hit balls, they’ll play, they’ll buy stuff off the beverage cart, and then they’ll stay afterwards (in the restaurant).”
Many Kayak Point’s regulars still have something of a wait-and-see attitude, Holmes said, but at least Access Golf “has gotten off on the right foot. I think myself and a lot of members are cautiously optimistic here.
“The fact is,” he went on, “Kayak Point has been a really good golf course, and it still can be. It just needs a little TLC. And it needs ownership that is responsible not only to the men’s club and the women’s club, but also to the general golfers that go there. So hopefully (Access Golf) will come in and treat people well and really listen to them, and especially the people that play there frequently.”
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